IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/29460.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Salary History and Employer Demand: Evidence from a Two-Sided Audit

Author

Listed:
  • Amanda Y. Agan
  • Bo Cowgill
  • Laura K. Gee

Abstract

We study how salary disclosures affect employer demand using a field experiment featuring hundreds of recruiters and over 2,000 job applications. We randomize the presence of salary questions and the candidates’ disclosures. Employers make negative inferences about non-disclosing candidates, and view salary history as a stronger signal about competing options than worker quality. Disclosures by men (and other highly-paid candidates) yield higher salary offers, but are negative signals of value (net of salary), yielding fewer callbacks. Male wage premiums are regarded as a weaker signal of quality than other wage premiums (such as working at higher paying firms).

Suggested Citation

  • Amanda Y. Agan & Bo Cowgill & Laura K. Gee, 2021. "Salary History and Employer Demand: Evidence from a Two-Sided Audit," NBER Working Papers 29460, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29460
    Note: LS
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w29460.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. John A. List, 2020. "Non est Disputandum de Generalizability? A Glimpse into The External Validity Trial," NBER Working Papers 27535, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Thomas S. Dee, 2005. "A Teacher Like Me: Does Race, Ethnicity, or Gender Matter?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 95(2), pages 158-165, May.
    3. Francine Blau & Peter Brummund & Albert Liu, 2013. "Trends in Occupational Segregation by Gender 1970–2009: Adjusting for the Impact of Changes in the Occupational Coding System," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 50(2), pages 471-492, April.
    4. Laura Giuliano & David I. Levine & Jonathan Leonard, 2009. "Manager Race and the Race of New Hires," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 27(4), pages 589-631, October.
    5. Francine Blau & Peter Brummund & Albert Liu, 2013. "Trends in Occupational Segregation by Gender 1970–2009: Adjusting for the Impact of Changes in the Occupational Coding System," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 50(2), pages 471-492, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. James Bessen & Erich Denk & Chen Meng, 2024. "Perpetuating wage inequality: evidence from salary history bans," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 22(3), pages 709-733, September.
    2. Mitchell Hoffman & Christopher T. Stanton, 2024. "People, Practices, and Productivity: A Review of New Advances in Personnel Economics," NBER Working Papers 32849, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Taiyo Fukai & Keisuke Kawata & Mizuki Komura & Takahiro Toriyabe, 2025. "The wage-mismatch index: A new indicator of labor demand in the job search market," Discussion Paper Series 296, School of Economics, Kwansei Gakuin University.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Kerstin Grosch & Simone Haeckl & Martin G. Kocher, 2022. "Closing the Gender STEM Gap - A Large-Scale Randomized-Controlled Trial in Elementary Schools," CESifo Working Paper Series 9907, CESifo.
    2. Katie Meara & Francesco Pastore & Allan Webster, 2020. "The gender pay gap in the USA: a matching study," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 33(1), pages 271-305, January.
    3. Stephan HUMPERT, 2015. "Gender-based Segregation before and after the Great Recession," Theoretical and Applied Economics, Asociatia Generala a Economistilor din Romania / Editura Economica, vol. 0(4(605), W), pages 53-62, Winter.
    4. Francine Blau & Peter Brummund & Albert Liu, 2013. "Trends in Occupational Segregation by Gender 1970–2009: Adjusting for the Impact of Changes in the Occupational Coding System," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 50(2), pages 471-492, April.
    5. Stephan Humpert, 2014. "Trends in occupational segregation: What happened with women and foreigners in Germany?," European Economic Letters, European Economics Letters Group, vol. 3(2), pages 36-39.
    6. Olga Alonso-Villar & Coral Río, 2017. "Mapping the occupational segregation of white women in the US: Differences across metropolitan areas," Papers in Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 96(3), pages 603-625, August.
    7. Brea-Martinez, Gabriel, 2021. "The beneficial impact of mother’s work on children’s absolute income mobility, Southern Sweden (1947-2015)," SocArXiv c27s8, Center for Open Science.
    8. Gordon B Dahl & Andreas Kotsadam & Dan-Olof Rooth, 2021. "Does Integration Change Gender Attitudes? The Effect of Randomly Assigning Women to Traditionally Male Teams," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 136(2), pages 987-1030.
    9. Laura Giuliano & Michael R Ransom, 2013. "Manager Ethnicity and Employment Segregation," ILR Review, Cornell University, ILR School, vol. 66(2), pages 346-379, April.
    10. Nir Jaimovich & Henry Siu & Guido Matias Cortes, 2017. "The End of Men and Rise of Women in the High-Skilled Labor Market," 2017 Meeting Papers 809, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    11. Seifert, Stefanie & Schlenker, Eva, 2014. "Occupational segregation and organizational characteristics. Empirical evidence for Germany," management revue - Socio-Economic Studies, Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG, vol. 25(3), pages 185-206.
    12. Olga Alonso-Villar & Coral del Río, 2017. "The Occupational Segregation of African American Women: Its Evolution from 1940 to 2010," Feminist Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 23(1), pages 108-134, January.
    13. S. C. Noah Uhrig & Nicole Watson, 2020. "The Impact of Measurement Error on Wage Decompositions: Evidence From the British Household Panel Survey and the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey," Sociological Methods & Research, , vol. 49(1), pages 43-78, February.
    14. Syed, Iffath Unissa, 2020. "Racism, racialization, and health equity in Canadian residential long term care: A case study in Toronto," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 265(C).
    15. Connolly, Laura, 2022. "The effects of a trade shock on gender-specific labor market outcomes in Brazil," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 74(C).
    16. Bhagavatula, Suresh & Bhalla, Manaswini & Goel, Manisha & Vissa, Balagopal, 2023. "Social diversity in corporate boards and firm outcomes," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 83(C).
    17. Majid Ahmadi & Gwen-Jiro Clochard & Jeff Lachman & John List, 2025. "Toward an Understanding of Discrimination When Multiple Channels Exist," Framed Field Experiments 00802, The Field Experiments Website.
    18. Francine D. Blau & Anne E. Winkler, 2011. "Women and Men in the Economy," Chapters, in: Gail M. Hoyt & KimMarie McGoldrick (ed.), International Handbook on Teaching and Learning Economics, chapter 66, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    19. Cortes, Patricia & Feng, Ying & Guida-Johnson, Nicolás & Pan, Jessica, 2023. "Automation and Gender: Implications for Occupational Segregation and the Gender Skill Gap," IZA Discussion Papers 16695, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    20. Chang‐Tai Hsieh & Erik Hurst & Charles I. Jones & Peter J. Klenow, 2019. "The Allocation of Talent and U.S. Economic Growth," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 87(5), pages 1439-1474, September.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • C90 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - General
    • J70 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor Discrimination - - - General
    • M50 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Personnel Economics - - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29460. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.